Look, I’m no fan of ads, but… It’s a free service that costs an ungodly amount of money to run. They’ve gotta make money somehow.

Of course the whole running it at a loss for a decade thing means they had to go the enshittification route. Could’ve had more ads and a subscription option long ago but they wanted to lull us into a false sense of security first :/

Misleading title sorta, or oversimplified. It’s PS5 selling less than any other PS before it.

I’d even argue that generative AI is machine learning, except the learning stops when the training does so it’s not learning continuously like ML in the classical sense.

Apple has $68B in cash on hand. Not stocks or other investments, cash.

And when they put all of that into their new RAM business, their investors are going to have a bunch of questions.

Yes, but that doesn’t change that there are dozens of companies that could make ram but don’t because they pass off the price increases and blame ram manufacturers while not risking their own money.

Even with tens of billions in cash it’s not that simple. Like I said, you first start off by convincing a bunch of people their non-competes and give up their massive annual bonuses, so that’s going to be an investment that the existing companies don’t have to make. Then you’ll have caught up with RAM manufacturing in about 10 years or so once you’ve ironed out all the details.

China, the biggest economic powerhouse in the world and the epicenter of modern electronics manufacturing, is still not making HBM3 or 4 or whatever nvidia uses now for Rubin at a commercially viable scale at CXMT, they’re only barely making enough DDR5 to get contracts.

That’s after starting the company in 2016 and getting DDR4 manufacturing going in 2020 and getting people from Samsung to steal trade secrets (and come work for them).

Just because you can build a fab for 20 billion doesn’t mean it’s only 20 billion to get started, or a quick 2-3 year endeavor to do so. Publicly traded companies can’t really do this because it’s a bunch of expenses over multiple years without a single cent of revenue for many years. This needs to be properly private cash or government backing.

Yes, I’m sure they can afford to buy tens of billions in servers just to store until obsolescence while they’re trying hard to even become profitable lol

OpenAI bought up memory wafers, not ready-made systems from nvidia. That’s something they may actually be hoarding to create a bottleneck.

Also true.

But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven’t created an alternative that doesn’t use a lot of RAM. If the answer is “I don’t have the time to”, then that’s probably also why the developer hasn’t made it use less RAM.

It takes double digit billions to start a manufacturing plant and that’s when you already have people who know what to do.

Most countries can’t really afford this in their budgets and I’m saying countries because it’d be a stupid endeavour for most private enterprises to even attempt. CXMT (DRAM) and YMTC (NAND) absolutely are sponsored by China, which is the only real way to get one of those companies going these days.

Google, Apple, etc could start their own memory companies if they wanted to. But it’s a hell of an expense to justify to your investors.

Why wouldn’t China just charge the increased prices, same as the DRAM cartel? Primarily they want to make money.

Unless they offer below-cost RAM for a few years to drive the competition out of business before jacking up their prices of course.

Run less software then. You can do that today.

Locally, not necessarily true. Globally, almost definitely.

What’s the power scale of yours?

I suspect the big ones use evaporative cooling because they’re trying to build in the gigawatt scale and IIRC there was talk about single racks reaching a megawatt soon, currently they’re ~150 kW.

The power density of those new nVIdia GPU compute servers is nuts and using evaporative cooling means less energy use than closed loop.

What I’m saying is, some of those planned datacenters wouldn’t be feasible with closed-loop water cooling. And yes, I agree with you that this should be legislated. If they can’t cool their servers without evaporating a bunch of drinking water, they can… have fewer servers.

Nobody is buying to destroy. They’re all starved for compute right now. Hence the dynamic pricing to stop people using at peak times.

There are over 300 companies with over a $50B market cap. The money is there.

That doesn’t mean they all have $20B in cash to spare, OR the expertise to pull it off. Even China is still playing catch-up and nobody else is even trying because to get started in 2026 would mean poaching a bunch of people with nasty non-compete clauses to even get started planning.

There are documented cases of these same 3 companies colluding to constrain supply, even openly discussing what the target price of DRAM should be. Some of the people who were found guilty got their fines or even prison time and then came back and got promoted.

Or their incoming RAM and SSD prices went up 500%. Hard to tell.

The big 3 are known for being a price fixing cartel.

Any individual company could make more money by scaling up production. But they don’t because they already know the other 2 won’t.

So in your analogy the actors have all agreed to only work 10 hours a week and it’s nearly impossible to become an actor without having tens of billions to start

Let’s not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They’re all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.